There’s no question that sharing information between ECAD and Agile PLM can be beneficial for both design engineers and product lifecycle managers. The question is how to enable effective collaboration between them without adding unnecessarily to engineering overhead.

Here’s the problem. A product engineer can’t even begin to build a new product – or optimize an existing one, for that matter – without first tracking down a ton of information that’s scattered through a multitude of disparate systems. What kind of LED would work here? Do we already have one? What products is it in? Is it any good? Maybe Paul knows. And even after spending hours – or longer – there’s no guarantee of getting the right information.

When it’s your challenge to figure out why a customer is experiencing a technical issue, and the best way to resolve it, the first thing you need to do is get your hands on all the relevant information that’s available to assess what’s happening. And you need to do it without wasting your time or the customer’s while you try to figure out where to find the data you need. Of course, there’s no guarantee you’ll ever know about all the sources of data that are out there, or that you’ll be able to get access to them even if you do.